The Road to Operationalization of Effective Tropical Forest Monitoring Systems

Carlos Portillo-Quintero,Mukti R Subedi,Jose L Hernández-Stefanoni,Gabriela Reyes-Palomeque

doi:10.3390/rs13071370

Abstract

The urgency to preserve tropical forest remnants has encouraged the development of remote sensing tools and techniques to monitor diverse forest attributes for management and conservation. State-of-the-art methodologies for mapping and tracking these attributes usually achieve accuracies greater than 0.8 for forest cover monitoring; r-square values of ~0.5–0.7 for plant diversity, vegetation structure, and plant functional trait mapping, and overall accuracies of ~0.8 for categorical maps of forest attributes. Nonetheless, existing operational tropical forest monitoring systems only track single attributes at national to global scales. For the design and implementation of effective and integrated tropical forest monitoring systems, we recommend the integration of multiple data sources and techniques for monitoring structural, functional, and compositional attributes. We also recommend its decentralized implementation for adjusting methods to local climatic and ecological characteristics and for proper end-user engagement. The operationalization of the system should be based on all open-source computing platforms, leveraging international support in research and development and ensuring direct and constant user engagement. We recommend continuing the efforts to address these multiple challenges for effective monitoring.

Highlights

Remote sensing-based tropical forest monitoring systems can be defined as the protocols, methodologies, and activities designed to quantify and track changes in forest attributes at any spatial and temporal scale
Traceable tropical forest attributes can range from vegetation structure to composition and plant functional traits [6,7,8,9,10]
The PRODES, Desmatamento em Tempo Real na Amazônia (DETER), and Global Forest Watch (GFW) systems provide forest cover change information with ~80% accuracy when compared to ground data

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. There is, an increasing need for integrating many structural, functional, and taxonomic traits into monitoring systems given the urgent need for strategic planning to halt tropical biodiversity loss Tracking all these variables at once is, a difficult undertaking that entails considerations of scale; the integration of data sources; the selection of efficient spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions; and the design of field data collection campaigns for training and validation. Operationalizing such integrated monitoring platforms requires establishing protocols and pipelines for data ingestion, processing, and dissemination that are computationally efficient and, preferably, low-cost. We comment on the past progress in the design and launch of tropical forest monitoring systems and discuss further considerations regarding effectiveness and integration

Forest Cover Change

New Data Sources

The Road to Effectiveness

Findings

Conclusions